"The enormity of the mistakes that have been made in his name professionally are such that I couldn't sort 'em all out," Monahan says. "So slowly I tried to bring people in to this little circle whom I could trust, who Roky would trust, and to try to make things better."

After dinner at the Taco Cabana, we head to Evelyn Erickson's house. Roky sees his mother every day. On the way, Stewart asks Erickson for directions.

"I guess just any way you wanna go, man," says Erickson, who moved with his family to Austin from Dallas when he was just two years old.

Evelyn Erickson's front yard is overgrown with bushes and tree limbs; cats run wild through the shrubbery. The scene inside is familiar: collected junk and discarded newspapers and magazines strewn across the floor. On the ceiling, Evelyn has painted a ghostly figure that looks strangely like Roky, though she explains it's actually a copy of a drawing given to her by one of Roky's fellow inmates at Rusk.

In the center of her house sits a piano, on top of which are a handful of cassettes, some of which bear Roky's name and a date. For years, she has been recording her son whenever he feels like performing. It was from such homemade cassettes that Monahan found the decade-old unreleased songs that served as the catalyst for All That May Do My Rhyme.

"Mother, what am I gonna do about my toilet?" Roky asks. "I gotta go to the bathroom. I guess I'll wait till it gets fixed." He paces about nervously, holding his crotch.

"Roky," Evelyn says, "just go now." He ignores her. Evelyn eventually calls a plumber, who agrees to come out to Roky's place in the morning.

As Evelyn talks on the phone, Roky sits in a thick recliner and picks up a guitar, idly and loudly strumming as his mother tries to speak into the receiver.

"You gonna play something?" Stewart asks Roky.
"I guess I could," Roky says, though he complains he doesn't have a pick. His mother hands him a plastic bag filled with blue guitar picks, from which Roky takes one, then mumbles something about it being too hard to use.

But he manages just fine and launches into a version of Richie Valens' "Donna"; as he does so, Evelyn sets up the recording device. The guitar is slightly out of tune, but Erickson's voice is perfect -- in-key and beautiful, quietly powerful. He recalls every word, never missing a note as his fingers glide effortlessly up and down the guitar's neck. If the guitar were in tune, the performance would be amazing, but because the instrument is just a bit off, it's incredibly haunting -- like the music of ghosts or something not of this world.

The impromptu performance hints at the origins of such songs as "I Have Always Been Here Before," a sweetly gorgeous song he recorded in 1981 that would be later echoed in the best of R.E.M. And it is to be reminded that Roky Erickson is one of the great but mostly unheralded figures in the history of rock and roll.

"Ya like that?" Erickson wonders when he finishes. "Straaaaange, isn't it? I've got a lot like that." He explains that he keeps such songs on a compilation titled something like "Contortion of Distortion" -- a record that exists only in his mind. He then proceeds to play snippets of such songs as "To Know Him Is to Love Him," "I'm a Fool for Your Love," and other '50s favorites. Each time he plays, he asks how we like the song, then says, "Strange, isn't it?"

When he's finished and gently places the guitar down on a couch, Evelyn plays back the tape for her son. Afterward, she will mark the cassette with the date. At least once in Roky's on-and-off career, his mother has licensed (actually, sold) such cassettes to record companies seeking to capitalize on Erickson's legend. The 1988 Live at the Ritz, released by a French fan club, and a portion of a recently released three-CD compilation on the Collectibles label called The Unreleased Masters came from Evelyn's hands -- which she is allowed to do, since she has power of attorney over Roky's affairs. Evelyn says such deals, however, were made for between $1,000 and $2,000 and before she helped secure trust funds for her son.